A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

The Indy Star has an editorial entitled: Keep Statehouse safe but accessible leading with:

The recent arrest of a man accused of threatening to set off bombs in the Indiana Statehouse should serve as a final wakeup call to take Statehouse security more seriously. No more hitting the snooze button.

The editorial suggests that the State House needs to run people through metal detectors before they enter the building. I understand the sentiment. It just makes me cringe a little every time I see a new metal detector. I’m not really convinced they make me any safer. Have incidents of violence decreased with more and more metal detectors going up?

If there is objective evidence that tells us these things are making us safer, then I could be convinced to change my tune. But, otherwise, I think we’re just creating the illusion of safety and getting ourselves in the habit of being searched and scanned and generally being treated like suspects instead of citizens.

The House concurred with the changes the Senate made in a number of bills, thereby avoiding the need for a conference committee and sending the bills to the Governor.

The Washington Post has an article entitled Erosion of Estate Tax Is a Lesson in Politics (washingtonpost.com)

It shows what slick marketing and a pile of cash can do for you. The Mars, Campbell, and Gallo family fortunes have been used to lobby for repeal of the estate tax, which nobody but the richest of the rich paid much of for the past century. Political marketing consultant Frank Luntz advised Republicans to rebrand the estate tax as a “death tax”. And, presto!, the rubes were suckered into voting against their economic self interest to the great benefit of the genetic lottery winners who stand to inherit the immense fortunes created by their great grandfathers. Other than simple ignorance, it baffles me why a middle-class citizen would think it is a good idea to run up gargantuan debts funded by their Social Security investments so that we can repeal a tax that has a substantial impact only on the very largest fortunes and that does a bit to inhibit the creation of an American aristocracy. Nobody has ever given me a good explanation why, if we are committed to reducing taxes, we should start with the estate tax rather than reducing payroll taxes or income taxes. Even if an heir has a moral claim on the fruits of daddy’s labor, certainly it cannot be a greater moral claim than an individual has on the fruits of his own labor.

The Indy Star has an article entitled Voter ID law looming for Hoosiers. SB 483 is being sent to the Governor and there is every indication he will sign it. Under that bill, Indiana will have the strictest identification requirements in the state. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Victor Heinold, R-Valparaiso, said the bill is needed to guard against voter fraud. “I want everyone in this state to have the right to vote — one time,” Heinold said. But, as Senator Lutz of Evansville pointed out, the only indication of voter fraud we have involves absentee ballots and this bill does nothing to address absentee ballots. In fact, if memory serves, the Republicans voted against amendments that would have tightened up absentee ballot provisions. Other states that have this sort of identity requirement allow more flexibility than just state or federal ID. Affidavits and school IDs and other sorts of IDs tend to be allowed.

Proponents of the bill note that it has a provision that allows a free state ID to be issued.

“Everyone is saying all you have to do is go get a free ID,” Falk said.

They forget, he said, that the Bureau of Motor Vehicles has made it harder to get that ID by requiring the person to show several pieces of identification that some people don’t have, such as a utility bill and a birth certificate. And, he said, it costs money to obtain a birth certificate, while voting should be free.

I suspect Republicans like the bill and Democrats don’t like the bill because historically Republicans have done better with fewer people voting. This will depress voter participation to a greater or lesser degree.

The Muncie Star Press has an article that caught my eye: Employee allegedly fired for reporting for jury duty According to the article:

Supervisors at a global clutch manufacturer in Jay County were threatened with criminal charges and contempt of court Tuesday for allegedly intimidating or dismissing a temporary employee summoned for jury duty.

“You are not above the government or the courts, do you understand me?” Delaware Circuit Court 2 Judge Richard Dailey loudly told one of the managers from FCC (Indiana). “You and your company are skating very close to jail time.”

. . .

Ashley Smith, a Delaware County resident, said during jury selection that FCC’s manager of general affairs Eric Garringer and receptionist Ruby Shaneyfelt told her she would be terminated if she responded to her jury summons.
. . .
At the request of deputy prosecutors, Judge Dailey on Tuesday issued warrants for the arrest of Shaneyfelt and Garringer after they failed to comply with an order to appear in court at 1:30 p.m. for a hearing on why they should not be found in contempt of court.

However, the judge stayed the serving of the warrants after Reed told him the pair were en route to Muncie from Portland. Reed blamed their tardiness on miscommunication.

So, these folks who indicated how much they thought of the legal process by failing to appear when ordered to do so, are using the brilliant defense of “she’s lying and she apparently quit.” I’ve had enough blue collar workers tell me that their employer either had or would fire them if court ordered garnishment was issued to where I’m pretty certain that kind of crap goes on. (Notwithstanding the fact that that sort of statement is self-serving in that the worker obviously doesn’t want a garnishment.)

Thought I’d raise this up from the comments to the front page because it’s a worthy discussion. In the topic Masson’s Blog: House Action on Various Bills, Matt posed the following question:

Do you ever get the sense that all of these types of bills really do nothing long term? Shouldn’t every school system get the same per pupil funding and if pupils are still failing, shouldn’t we get new administrators or teachers? The lack of accountibility in the school system is quite scary.

My response:

Well, my primary perspective is that of a husband to a teacher. But, it seems that most teachers really just want to teach. Often they find themselves wading in a sea of red tape trying to get anything done (think Office Space when the main character gets hassled by 5 different supervisors for failing to use the new cover sheet on the TPS report.)

Then you have the problem of having few real remedies to get the bad apples out of their classrooms. But, no legislator is eager to pass legislation that comes down hard on indifferent parents. Of course, a lot of parents aren’t indifferent, they just have to work eleventy million hours to pay for gas and electricity. (You can’t afford a Wal-mart lifestyle on just a Wal-mart salary.)

Then you have what I call the student subsidy issue. Currently, as a society, we’ve mostly decided that even hard to educate children should get a basic education. But, we tend to fund schools on a per pupil basis. The problem is that students are not widgets and some students are a lot more difficult to educate. In fact, their very presence in the classroom makes the rest of the class more difficult to educate. Our current system doesn’t account for that very well, and a voucher system that doesn’t take this fact into consideration will make things even worse. You can pretty much bet that the families on the ball enough to take advantage of vouchers won’t be the ones with problem children. So, the easily educated students –who are the ones subsidizing the difficult students — pack up and move to a better school. The better schools get better and the worse schools get worse, and it won’t have much at all to do with the teaching. Seems to me, if we’re going to throw the hard to educate children to the wolves, we might as well be explicit about it. Let the public schools kick them out, then I’ll bet you those public schools improve without the need for vouchers.

Finally, I get the feeling that teachers need a better way to apply pressure to school administrators. My experience with school administrators is that they tend not to be very responsive to teachers or to educational needs. They tend to be good at placating noisy parents and tinkering with what an old boss called “the indicia of productivity.” In other words, they can improve test scores and statistics without doing much to improve the actual education. (They are also more apt to hassle a teacher about the new cover sheet for the TPS report than to enquire about little Jimmy’s difficulty with fractions.)

The Indy Star has several articles on Monday’s legislative activity.